This week, I have been mostly reading:

• A Brief History of Everything That Happened Because of George H.W. Bush’s Insecurity — Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone includes this thing I did not know, or am too senile to recall: Bush once sent a poor black kid to a real prison for real years for the crime of being a political prop. In the summer of 1989, while vacationing avec speedboat in his Kennebunkport, Maine, estate, Bush came up with the brilliant idea, or at least acceded to one dreamed up by aides. He would do a live address to the country while holding up a bag of crack that had been sold just outside the White House. The idea was to show that crack could “be bought anywhere.” The problem was, nobody sold crack in Lafayette Square near the White House, which is where Bush aides wanted the crack found. There is a long backstory here that involves administration officials tasking the DEA with securing a bust near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. They ended up having an undercover agent contact an 18-year-old named Keith Jackson from a poor neighborhood in southeast Washington. He was asked to bring his wares to the White House. […] The federal judge in the case, Stanley Sporkin, wanted desperately to not impose a stiff sentence on Jackson, but — in a problem none of the Bush aides who cooked up this dumb scheme thought of — mandatory sentencing laws handcuffed Sporkin. So the kid was sentenced to 10 years (he was later paroled). Sporkin, a former CIA general counsel appointed by Reagan, suggested Jackson ask Bush for a pardon: “He used you, in the sense of making a big drug speech… But he’s a decent man, a man of great compassion. Maybe he can find a way to reduce at least some of that sentence.” Bush blew that off and instead issued pardons to six Iran-Contra defendants on Christmas Day in 1992.
• Progressives to Conservatives: You Hate Liberals For All The Wrong Reasons — Ted Rall:
  
• The French Protests Do Not Fit a Tidy Narrative — Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone: [Max] Boot wrote a sad column about the yellow vests. He wondered why people on the left, right and in between were mocking a piece he wrote 18 months ago, in which he said, “America needs its own Macron — a charismatic leader who can make centrism cool.” Macron has a 23 percent approval rating, Paris seems to be on fire, and people are even spray-painting the Arc de Triomphe. How, Boot asked, could all this be happening to such a cool politician? When an online commenter suggested “centrism” was just another word for “elitism,” Boot was again puzzled. What’s wrong with elitism? Don’t we all want the best at the helm? You wouldn’t want an un-elite airline pilot, would you? This was the Spinal Tap version of neoliberalism: what’s wrong with being elite? The inability of pundits to make sense of the plummeting popularity of “centrism” is a long-developing story in the West. Over and over, a daft political class paternalistically implements changes more to the benefit of donors than voters, then repeatedly is baffled when they prove unpopular.
• ‘Eat The Rich’: Still a Popular Idea in French Uprisings, Especially With the Yellow Vests — Christopher Dickey in the Daily Beast: The leaderless demonstrators trashing French cities or standing by watching while anarchist and fascist and for-the-hell-of-it casseurs do the job for them, have put forth long lists of inchoate demands about which there’s no consensus. But one big issue does remain that has resonance with the wider masses. They want Macron to reimpose a wealth tax on top of France’s already very high income taxes. Although the revenues from the “solidarity tax on fortunes,” known as the ISF, might go to good social causes, that’s not the reason for its political importance. It’s a popular idea because it’s punitive. French society was traditionally, famously jealous of wealth, and angered by it, long before the current problems of inequality created by global financial markets. As Dana Kennedy pointed out in The Daily Beast last week, for centuries the vast peasant population of France lived in horrible conditions. There was a long history of pitchfork-wielding popular uprisings against an indolent aristocracy, and by the time of the Enlightenment, that popular anger was turning against bourgeois merchants as well.
• The Paris ‘Yellow Vest’ Protests Show the Flaws of Capitalism — Caroline Haskins, Motherboard: This is a problem with climate negotiations generally: the policies that are supposed to mitigate damage in the present and future and protect the world’s most vulnerable are negotiated by people who are largely immune to the short-term material concerns of living paycheck-to-paycheck, and the long-term material concerns of climate change are purely theoretical to them, given their economic status. That’s why the policies that end up coming into practice don’t consider the urgency and immediacy of the material, life-and-death concerns of the working class. The working class is asked to sacrifice now, and upper classes, meanwhile, are rarely asked to make many material sacrifices at all.
• Constant anxiety of benefit sanctions is toxic for mental health of disabled people — Danny Taggart, Ewen Speed, and Jaimini Mehta in the Conversation precis their new report for Inclusion London: One man, Charlie, who participated in our study, described how a sanction left him with no food or electricity on Christmas day, leading to a suicide attempt and mental breakdown […] The sanction actually pushed him further away from work. He said that he now has a problem going into the Job Centre: “Because of the damage that the benefit sanction did to me.” Part of the rationale is based on a psychological theory known as behavioural economics, which uses a range of nudges to encourage people to make more rational choices. So-called “nudge theory” has been used to encourage behaviour change in areas such as paying tax on time and organ donation. But in the context of welfare support, the use of incentives take the form of perverse and punitive incentives. Perverse, because they can require disabled people to understate their qualifications to obtain any form of employment. The same man told us the Job Centre staff told him to remove his degree from his CV so that he wouldn’t appear overqualified for the jobs they told him to apply for. He said it had a real impact on his feeling of self-worth. […] The incentives are punitive because they leave disabled people in a state of constant dread, feeling worried all of the time, whether they are sanctioned or not.
• Corporate-Funded Judicial Boot Camp Made Sitting Federal Judges More Conservative — David Dayen at the Intercept: In 1976, the Law and Economics Center, a corporate-funded academic organization now housed at George Mason University, began holding an intensive, all-expenses-paid, two- to three-week economics seminar for federal judges in Plantation Island, Florida. Organized by conservative economist Henry Manne, the Economics Institute for Federal Judges featured some of America’s most renowned professors teaching classical economic theories that could be applied to the courtroom. Though controversial in its day, the seminar recurred until 1999, and at its peak, over 40 percent of all federal judges had attended. According to a new working paper by three researchers, this indoctrination into law and economics — which emphasized cost-benefit analysis and economic efficiency; warned of the downsides of union protections and environmental regulations; and found benefits to deterrence — had a quantifiable effect on future rulings. Judges who attended Manne’s seminars rendered more conservative verdicts in economics cases. They were more likely to rule against the National Labor Relations Board or the Environmental Protection Agency. They employed more economics language in their rulings, according to a linguistic analysis. And they imposed harsher prison sentences, particularly after receiving more discretion to set terms in 2005.